Searching TIMU

To help you quickly locate things you are working on, TIMU has two easy-to-use search tools, located at the top of the screen and inside some module views. The search tools work just like you would expect them to - type in any string of text to see results that contain a match for that string. You can quickly locate projects, people, files and folders, or any other TIMU content this way.

Main Search Bar

By default, the main search bar will return results from the entire network you are working in. When you use the main search bar, results will display as preview cards with some information about the item. Clicking on a project or module will jump to that location in TIMU without the need to navigate through menus or nested project structures. Using the main search bar to open module contents preserves your location in TIMU, so you can open a task or discussion from another project without leaving the project you are currently working in.

Narrowing your Seach

There are a few tricks you can use if you need finer control over your search results. To narrow down the results, there are filtering tools at the top of the screen. The first dropdown lets you search for a specific type of item, like files or chats. The second dropdown lets you specify the maximum age of the results returned, ignoring anything older than the specified interval. Finally, you can use the checkbox to include or exclude archived items from your search.

If you want to filter your search by the value of a particular field, type the name of the field followed by a colon, then type the value to search by. Enclose the information in quotes if it contains spaces. For example, if you wanted to find a task assigned to your coworker Hiro Matsuda, you could type "assigned to":"Hiro Matsuda" to show only those items assigned to him. This works for any field, so status:closed, "work date":today, and milestone:"initial deployment" are also all valid.

To only display items from a particular user, such as modules they created or messages they sent, type from: followed by the user's name after your search terms. For example, to search for messages from Alice about prototypes, you could type "prototypes from:Alice" or "from:Alice prototypes". You can search for your own items by typing "assigned to":me, from:me, and so on.

You can also limit the scope of your search to a particular project or module by typing a forward slash after the project or module name, such as Markets/Desert/ or Sites/"New York"/.

Note that all of these techniques can be combined, so if you need to get information from one of your assigned tasks in the "Tradeshow" project that you closed yesterday, you could search for Tradeshow/tasks/ "assigned to":me status:closed
to find the task without having to leave the project you are currently working in.

By combining filters we can make sure we didn't miss Pedro's updates from yesterday:

And we can quickly navigate the seas of design files to find the ones created by Dinesh:

Searching Within Views

Views in some TIMU modules also have a search bar, with the scope of the search results limited to that view instead of the entire network. Like the main search bar, there are a number of special commands you can use to easily filter the items in the view. This is especially useful for Task Dashboards that aggregate tasks from several Task modules or separate projects. Let's look at a few examples, starting with the view as it appears without any search terms entered:

This is a task list that scrolls far off the bottom of the screen. Rather than trying to manually scroll through and see which tasks are blocked, we could try the following search:

Likewise, instead of trying to browse for an individual user's tasks, we can easily filter the display to only display those tasks:

And, just like with the network search bar, we can combine filters:

This works especially well with board-style views that can contain information that isn't displayed on the cards. In this example, we have a board-style view showing information from several projects at once, but the status of Jose's tasks isn't readily apparent:

With a few filters typed into the search bar, we can get a clearer picture of what Jose is working on:

Finally, you can also use the keyword container to filter task in this multi-project view based on their parent. Below, we are displaying only tasks from Client C:

Closing Thoughts

That was a lot of information! To quickly recap:

TIMU's main search bar is always accessible, and lets you search the entire network. You can open an item from another project, without leaving the project you are working in.

Use the forward slash in the main search bar to drill down into individual projects and modules.

Some views have their own search bar that only searches the current module. These also support search filters.

We've covered a lot of ground here, but TIMU's search features are so flexible that we can't possibly cover every use case. Do you have questions about searching? Did we leave out your favorite combination of filters? Let us know in the comments section!